39. Derek
DEREK
The heated food tents sat in a row along the square's east edge, canvas walls glowing faint gold from the space heaters inside them, propane lines snaking under the fabric toward each stall.
I caught the smell the second I stepped inside the first tent, sharp enough now that I didn't need to think twice about what it was.
"You smell that?"
Priya was already crouched by the connection point behind the funnel cake stand, flashlight in one hand, the other braced against the cold ground. "Smelled it from twenty feet out. Propane, not woodsmoke. Somebody's line is weeping somewhere in this bank."
"Leah flagged something like this on her walk this morning. Tomás checked it and found nothing obvious."
"Tomás checked the connections. This isn't the connections.
" She ran her flashlight along the length of the line where it disappeared under the tent wall, slow and methodical, the same patient thoroughness I'd watched her build in just a handful of months on this job.
"There. Hairline crack in the hose itself, not the fitting.
Small enough that it wouldn't show up unless you were looking at the actual line and not just the joints. "
I crouched beside her, following the beam of her flashlight to a spot no wider than a fingernail, a faint hiss audible only once I knew exactly where to listen for it.
Six tents ran in a row behind us, canvas walls glowing warm against the gray afternoon, every one of them wired into the same feed line running under the frost-hardened ground.
Doris had her fry bread rig two stalls down, Hector's roasted corn cart sat just past that, and beyond both of them a popcorn vendor was already testing her machine with a burst of steam that fogged half her tent.
All of it depended on the same length of rubber hose currently sitting cracked open under my flashlight.
"How long's that been leaking?"
"Hard to say. Slow. Real slow, based on how faint the smell still is even standing right on top of it.
" She sat back on her heels, already reaching for the kit she'd hauled over.
"Small mercy, it's a food tent bank and not the fireworks staging area.
If this was near the pyrotechnics I'd be a lot less calm right now. "
"You seem plenty calm as it is, for a woman crouched over a hissing propane line."
"I'm always calm. I just move fast too." She was already stripping the damaged section of line, hands quick and certain, the kind of competence that used to take her twice as long to reach and now looked as natural as breathing.
"Give me ten minutes and a patch kit and this stops being a problem instead of becoming one. "
I radioed Tomás to shut the valve feeding that specific line while Priya worked, watching her hands move with the same unhurried precision I'd have expected from Sarge himself twenty years into this job.
She cut the damaged section clean, fitted a replacement coupling, and wrapped it with the kind of care that made clear she had no intention of doing this twice.
"Ready for pressure," she said, straightening.
I nodded to Tomás, who cracked the valve back open slow, and the three of us stood there in the cold canvas light watching the gauge climb steady toward spec.
It held.
Priya crouched close, running a gloved hand along the new seal, checking for the faintest hiss, the faintest wet sheen that would mean trouble. Nothing showed. The needle sat exactly where it should sit and stayed there.
"It's holding at spec," she said, satisfaction plain in her voice for the first time since we'd walked in. "Clean patch. I'd stake my cert on it."
"Run it again in fifteen. I want to see it hold twice before I trust it holds all night."
"Copy." She didn't argue, didn't roll her eyes at the redundancy, just reset the gauge and settled back onto her heels to wait it out with me.
We stood in silence a minute, both of us watching the needle, the tent smelling faintly of propane and fry oil and cold canvas, somewhere outside the muffled sound of the festival crowd building toward the afternoon rush.
"You did good work catching this," I said. "Both times. The heater bank two days ago and this."
"I didn't catch this one. Leah did." Priya said it plainly, no ego attached to the correction. "I just found the actual crack once she told us where to look harder."
"She's not wrong about much these days."
"No, she really isn't." Priya glanced at me sideways, something knowing in it that I chose not to examine too closely. "You planning on doing anything about that eventually, Chief?"
"I'm handling a propane leak right now, Chen."
"Copy that too." She grinned and looked back at the gauge, letting me off the hook with more grace than I probably deserved.
The second pressure test held exactly like the first, needle steady, seal dry, nothing to suggest the patch was anything but solid.
I ran through the math anyway, the way I always did before signing off on anything with this many people standing downstream of my decision.
Pull the whole line and we lost heat to six food vendors on the single highest-revenue night of the year, half the food court running cold with maybe four hours' notice to figure out an alternative nobody had planned for.
Leave it running unmonitored and I was gambling on a patch holding for twelve straight hours under a load it hadn't been tested against long-term. Neither option sat easy.
But there was a third option, the one that fit the situation better than the two extremes I kept defaulting to out of old habit.
A closely watched, actively monitored line was different from either pulling it entirely or walking away and hoping for the best. That was the job.
A bad year had taught me to distrust anything that wasn't shut down completely, but that wasn't always the right call.
Digby's voice sat somewhere in the back of my head while I worked through it, that quiet warning about regional consolidation still unresolved and unspoken to anyone but me.
A department that panicked and shut down half the festival over a clean patch and a passing test would read one way to a board deciding whether Pinewood Ridge could still run its own house.
A department that caught a problem early, fixed it right, and kept careful eyes on it the rest of the night would read a very different way.
I told myself that wasn't why I was making this call. I mostly believed it.
"Rotate someone past this bank every twenty minutes tonight," I said. "I want eyes on it constantly. Not a glance walking by. An actual check, gauge and seal both, logged every time."
"Copy that, Chief."
"If the reading moves even slightly off spec, this line gets shut down immediately, no discussion, no waiting to see if it's a fluke. I don't care if it's eleven fifty nine and Judy's mid-countdown speech. It goes cold the second the number's wrong."
"Understood." Priya packed up her kit, methodical as ever, and paused before standing.
"For what it's worth, I think you're making the right call.
Pulling it entirely over a clean patch and a solid pressure test would be overcautious to the point of hurting people who didn't do anything wrong.
Doris and Hector and half this row depend on tonight's revenue more than most people in this town realize. "
"I know what it costs them if I'm wrong."
"You're not wrong. You're careful. Those aren't the same thing." She shouldered her kit and headed for the tent flap. "I'll take the first rotation myself. Figured you'd want somebody you trust on the initial check."
"I trust all of you. That's not the issue."
"Sure. But you'll sleep better tonight knowing I did the first one personally." She said it without looking back, already gone before I could argue the matter further, and I let it go because she'd earned that much.
I stayed behind a minute after she left, running my own hand along the new seal one more time out of a habit I probably wasn't ever going to shake, some old instinct that trusted my own fingers over any gauge.
There was nothing there, just dry, cold rubber, holding exactly where it should.
I logged the repair myself in the binder we kept clipped to the main tent pole, time and pressure and both our initials, the kind of paperwork that felt pointless right up until the one time it wasn't.
I radioed Sarge next, keeping it short. "Propane line behind the food tents got patched. Solid repair, holding at spec on two separate pressure tests. I want a rotating check every twenty minutes through the whole evening, logged each time. Priya's got the first one."
"Copy. I'll build it into tonight's rounds myself, make sure nobody forgets by hour six when everybody's tired and the fireworks crew needs bodies too."
"Appreciate it, Sarge."
"You doing all right out there?"
"I'm good." I ran the numbers one more time in my head anyway, out of habit more than doubt, vendors and revenue and risk all stacked up against each other the way they always were on nights like this.
It came out the same way it almost always did when I let myself do the math instead of running on old fear.
The job done right, carefully, with eyes on it the whole way through, beat the job not done at all every time I actually stopped to think it through instead of reacting.
"You don't sound completely good."
"I sound like a man who just spent thirty minutes staring at a propane gauge, Sarge. Give me a minute."
He laughed, low and easy over the radio, and signed off without pushing further, which was its own kind of mercy after the morning I'd had.
I stood alone in the tent a moment longer, listening to the crowd noise building steadily outside, the smell of propane finally fading back under fry oil and cinnamon and cold canvas, everything exactly where it needed to be.
Satisfied, I stepped back out into the cold afternoon light, tent flap falling shut behind me, and went looking for Leah before the gates opened for the evening crowd.
She deserved to hear this handled personally instead of secondhand through Sarge or Tomás, deserved to know her instinct this morning had been right, sharp enough to catch something the rest of us had nearly walked past. I found myself smiling at the thought of telling her, at the particular satisfaction that was going to show on her face when she realized her nose had caught what six years of training almost missed entirely.
She was going to pretend it was nothing, probably, wave it off the way she waved off most of her own instincts, and I was going to make sure she heard exactly how much it mattered anyway.
A season spent standing next to firefighters had sharpened something in her that most civilians never developed in a lifetime.
I wanted her to carry that into tonight instead of doubting herself next time.
Nothing in me was braced for anything else.
The line was patched, the pressure held, the rotation was set, and the biggest night of the year was about to open exactly the way we'd planned it for months.
I walked toward the square with an easy stride I hadn't felt all week, certain for the first time in longer than I wanted to admit that we'd thought of everything, that we'd already handled the hard part.
I found her by the gazebo, clipboard tucked under one arm, already three conversations deep with a vendor about extension cords. She looked up when she saw me coming, and whatever she read on my face made her set the clipboard down before I'd said a single word.